A question I receive a lot from customers and partners is if there’s a way to implement the PlaceInBottom effect on a report in RDLC.
As you might already know, in the Classic Client, which I should now call the Development Environment, in the report object, there’s a property called PlaceInBottom. It determines whether a footer section should be printed at the bottom of the (physical) page.
As described in see Converting Dynamics NAV Classic Reports To RDLC – Part 2, Dynamics NAV provides a Tools->Create Layout Suggestion menu option to automatically generate an RDLC layout for an existing NAV classic report.
Unfortunately, because classic and RDLC layouts are associated with two different reporting tools, they are not fully compatible. Some elements of a classic report will not properly translate to an RDLC layout.
First, I might as well be up-front: the basic process of converting Dynamics NAV classic reports to RDLC layouts is clunky, time-consuming, and somewhat error-prone. This is caused in large part because you have to repeatedly work back and forth between the NAV classic report designer and the Visual Studio report designer (if you don’t understand why, see Converting Dynamics NAV Classic Reports To RDLC – Part 1).
As Microsoft has already announced, Dynamics NAV 2013 will run only RDLC reports and will discontinue the use of NAV classic reports. This means all customers upgrading to NAV 2013 will have to convert their classic reports to the RDLC format.
This early draft of NAV 2013 RDLC reporting guidelines was placed on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog earlier in the year. As the original author notes, they’re essentially “a checklist at this point, which you can go through one by one. For example, it is a good practice to define the Page Width, Page Height, and margins in the Report Properties before starting to design your report.”
In Part 1 of this series of posts, we examined the underlying technologies behind RDLC reporting. In Part 2, we looked at the basic process of converting Dynamics NAV classic reports to an RDLC layout. In Part 3, we began examining some of the issues you will encounter when you use NAV’s Create Layout Suggestion function to generate an RDLC layout, starting with vertical and horizontal spacing.
The other day, I was trying to edit a NAV 2009 RDLC report, and I noticed that “Report Items” was conspicuously missing from the Toolbox menu. I tried right-clicking and selecting Show All, but that didn’t help. I even tried restarting my PC to no avail. Without the Report Items, there was no way for me to add controls to my report (short of copy / paste an existing control and changing the value, but that’s not a fix).
Vertalen
